Although the Goanna Runtime Environment™ is in its concept a good idea, the implementation of it is a bust due to primarily the unnecessary build system changes that were not properly tested in terms of how they would impact application performance, operation and stability.
At the risk of being accused of "bashing" again by Tobin in his new-found circle of "friends", the truth is that this was primarily his plan and work, and driven by the desire to make the tree as opaque as possible to people who were still on UXP and did not have a commit history to draw from to follow location changes. Alongside that, a truncated repository with no history would complete his plan to obfuscate, primarily to thwart what he considered "enemies" in some kind of political conflict -- a concept I regularly told him to abandon and to stop waging war. I wasn't even aware that he had, apparently, put pretty much every project and fork that was not "us" on his infamous "wall of shame" while there were no good reasons to do so, and that just won't do, and is unacceptable.
While I still absolutely disagree with flaunting Open Source licensing terms, and will continue to defend my branding as a mark of quality assurance (which will likely continue to remain a point of conflict on operating systems where, although possible, we aren't allowed to use known-good in-tree libs), this kind of tunnel vision on his behalf has made it clear that a lot of his recent contributions as well as the work done in terms of re-shaping the platform services are, ultimately, moot as well as a liability. A project of this scope and complexity needs big picture approaches, not tunnel vision. There is also considerable doubt about the integrity of committed work in the period since our internal conflict happened at the end of last year.
So what will we do now?
Even though I really wanted to avoid parallel development which I've already done way too much of in this project, what needs to be done will ask for more of it.
The best way forward will be to go back to UXP, incorporate all the development advancements that are sane and trusted from GRE, and work on truly developing in the spirit of broad applicability and compatibility. I've already contacted the White Star developer to ask about collaboration and his adoption of UXP, and he expressed that he never really wanted the split, and we could find a way forward with joint efforts to support Mac as well as Windows and Linux in a more official capacity.
This will mean a lot of wasted work from all involved over the past months, but I think it's better to discard a few months of work than to toss the entire future of the project to the wind out of some sense of "exclusivity" that nobody really asked for (except maybe one...).
If Tobin decides to continue working on Mozilla code, which he seems to be flip-flopping on day by day, he's welcome to use the GRE code "he worked so hard for" and his "phobos" proprietary site code to have his own independent project; just not the name or trademarks. I will keep everything open from this point forward, no matter what may. Who knows, maybe one day in the future he'll even release Borealis on it and prove that the code is viable after all.
The repositories are in a bit of disarray at the moment but I will work on cleaning that up after making sure our current 29.4.* versions are as good as they are going to be (i.e. fixing the major reported issue in 29.4.5 asap). To clearly mark things we'll also be abandoning the v30 major version number for future releases which will be v31 and up, when they are done. Of course, we'll be keeping up with security issues for as long as it takes to re-unify the XUL platform.
If anything isn't clear, feel free to discuss below -- I'll be happy to amend this post with any pertinent questions to keep things easy to read and a compact write-up.
As a clarification, in case there are conflicting publications about what is and is not part of this project, here's a run-down of the various domains:
- *.palemoon.org - under our control and once again available to the public
- *.basilisk-browser.org - under our control, the browser is discontinued, but I'm still open to offers to take over the project if someone wants to continue an Australis-class browser on UXP. I just don't have the capacity to keep developing a second browser that is essentially the same as Pale Moon in operation but with a UI I don't like.
- thereisonlyxul.org - operated by Tobin where he has published increasingly controversial information about XUL applications and forks.
- fossamail.org - previously in use by me to publish the FossaMail mail client. The domain was claimed by Tobin after I let it lapse after the client was discontinued, and currently under his control.